Three Wild Months
by SergeantSarcasm1
Summary: Karkat Vantas is dying. Perhaps a last minute idea he had would make his last months alive worth it, although that growling voice in his head might hinder progress along the way. Humanstuck.


Yeah this popped into my head and I just jotted it down at like midnight. I hope you like it, reviews are appreciated but not needed.

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Karkat Vantas wasn't ever much for formalities, in fact, he preferred profanities and colourful epithets. He had been dreading this day ever since he had first scheduled the appointment he was supposed to attend. Sure, he usually could put up with being seen by a doctor, but today might just try his patience a little. A torrent of emotions swirled around in his head and stomach, ranging from irritated to sad to even angry.

To make a long story just a little bit longer, Karkat was dying. Or he just always felt like he was, maybe it was all in his head. It had all started on the day he had returned from his long and quite wasteful stint in the Army. He was deployed, and sent back after exactly 378 days fighting. Patrolling the desert day in and day out was so boring it often made him wish for a nuclear winter. He had had a nasty encounter with an enemy patrol, rendering him moot when it came to serving in the military any more. Two bullets to the spine and leg, respectively, took him permanently out of service.

After spending god knows how long laid up in a hospital bed, Karkat was released and allowed to return to his home. His Dad was long dead, a newspaper with his obituary had been tacked to his front door. His home was nothing but dust, dirt, and must now. A thick layer of gray-brown dust covered all the surfaces in his home, save for the inside of the fridge and freezer. His laptop was still closed and perched on his old desk, the chair still had that familiar squeak when he sat down in it...it was like being home again, just without the best part of your childhood being there.

It took him a long time for him to beat the dust off of all the surfaces in his home, but after the gray-brown dust was gone, the vibrant colouring of his furniture seemed to return just a bit. Sure, the couch still looked gaudy and outdated and the walls were still painted a dreadful shade of shit-brown, but it was still home. Smelly, hideous looking home.

First comes nostalgia, then comes crippling survivor's guilt because you're alive and your Dad isn't. Even if he always smelled like fish and was naggy, he was still the most wonderful and happy man Karkat had ever met. He had always made Karkat lunch and patted him on the back before he left for school in the mornings and he always was there if Karkat had a problem...

In comparison to being shot, sobbing into a musty blanket and screaming while mentally asking yourself depressing questions was the more painful option in Karkat's mind.

_'Why? Why couldn't that shot to the spine have killed me? Why did I have to live instead of Dad?!'_

Guilt riddled rhetorical questions were apparently the best way to self-counsel. It had taken months to get out of the stages of grieving...and Karkat was catapulted back into them once again when his friend Gamzee Makara was run down in the middle of a busy street. Gamzee had been absentmindedly watching a dove flutter from awning to awning when the crosswalk's light turned from green to red. A cop car ran him down as he toddled across the white stripes on the pavement.

Sadly, Karkat was the one they called in to identify the body. Why they hadn't called in Sollux or Terezi or even Eridouche- Eridan was anyone's guess, really. Sure, call in the PTSD-addled, technically crippled, guilt riddled war veteran to look at their best friend's dead body. No way that could be a bad thing or anything. Nope, not at all. Although truth be told Karkat hadn't been expecting something as...disgusting and nauseating as what lay on that morgue table to be awaiting his arrival.

The moment the morgue attendant lifted up that sheet, bile rose in Karkat's throat. The cold, dead body of Gamzee Makara lay on that metal table, although at first glance it didn't look like much of anything. It was incredibly mangled, with bones poking through skin and bruising creating a weaving pattern that stained Gamzee's pale skin with purple and green marring. It could have been artistic, if it wasn't on his friend's dead body.

The veins in Gamzee's arms stuck up like a overinflated balloons, and they looked like they would burst if touched. His arms hung limply, their tendons torn and bones cracked beyond use. His legs were each covered in road rash, enormous tears and deep punctures dotting the rash. His arms and legs weren't the worst of it all, really, they got it easy compared to his face.

His face was deeply bruised, purple colouring covering every inch of what used to be warm, soft skin. Three horizontal gashes crossed through his face, one just under his nose, one just across the tip of his nose, and one that went through both of his eyes. Each gash revealed more of the inside of his face than Karkat had ever wanted to be acquainted with. The lowest scratch revealed teeth and bone, the middle one showed off the pristine cheekbones that Gamzee possessed, and the third revealed...well, far more of the eye than anyone had ever wanted to see. Metallic shards riddled the three gashes, not unlike shrapnel littering the ground after a bomb dropped.

Karkat could only have guessed that they hadn't cleaned up the body at that time, they wanted to identify it first or something like that. The funeral had been a whole other story, though.

Literally nobody had turned up except Karkat, a tall man in a Rastafarian-beanie with dreadlocks who smelled of several different varieties of cough syrup, Tavros, and a priest. Even then the entire affair was difficult to sit through. Karkat spent the entire time quietly crying into his sleeve. He left that funeral with puffy eyes and a raw upper lip from wiping his nose so much. Karkat never was one to express his emotions too openly (unless the emotion in question was a variant of anger), but he was sobbing like a small child that just had to flush it's pet fish down the toilet.

Honestly, Karkat did still have quite a few..."friends" who lived near him, if some of them could be referred to as that. One was blind and slightly annoying, one was going blind slowly, one was a fashionista who enjoyed formalities a bit too much, one was a kindly paraplegic who would definitely give you the time of day, one was a little obsessed with cats and seemed to want nothing more than to get in his pants, and one was a pretentious doucheguzzling shitsponge asscanon fuckbrownie who didn't deserve the expensive sunglasses he liked to wear so much. Just the thought of that last one was enough to fill Karkat's stomach with enough boiling rage and frustration to wipe out a small nation.

"Mr. Vantas? It's just me, Doctor Tomasoski."

Well damn, that got Karkat out of his flashback pretty quickly.

Doctor Tomasoski was a tall, gangly man with greying hair and a...questionable accent. As per the usual, he was wearing a bow tie and a lavender dress shirt. Maybe the whole lab coat thing had been nixed and Karkat just didn't know about it, but he always expected his doctor to be wearing a lab coat when he walked in. Doctor Tomasoski sat down on the stool that was almost always next to the computer on the office's counter, and spun around to face Karkat.

"Mr. Vantas- Karkat...I have some bad news."

Shit, first name basis with a medical professional. In Karkat's experience, he never had had his doctor call him by his first name before. It must have been some sort of bullshit about respect and manners or something like that. Still, the genuinely worried look on his doctor's face was more than enough to make Karkat squirm in his seat.

"We've gotten your test results back...now, this is very heavy news to receive I understand, but...you have brain cancer."

Karkat didn't know how to respond. His jaw was practically on the floor, tears were in his eyes...the news itself was like being his in the face with an aluminum baseball bat.

"Specifically, there's a tumor on your brain stem. We originally thought it to be benign...but it quite clearly isn't anymore. You have about three months, and that's if you're lucky."

Karkat looked down at the floor, tears flowing freely from his eyes. Oh god...sure, he had wished he was dead before, but he hadn't ever thought that anything would ever come of it. His doctor scooted over closet to him and put a firm hand on his shoulder.

"I'm so, so sorry Karkat. I want to convey my sympathies...and I honestly hope you pull through. There are chemotherapy options that you can-"

Karkat raised one of his hands and balled it into a fist.

"No."

"I beg your pardon, Karkat?"

"I said_ no._"

"Karkat, I understand the denial stage of this all, but as a medical professional my job is to offer you the best treatment options available-"

"**NO.**" That came out surprisingly louder than Karkat had wanted it to.

"Okay...can you tell me why?" The look of surprise on Doctor Tomasoski's face would have been amusing in any other situation.

"I just..." Don't let your voice crack Karkat, conceal don't feel. "Chemo will only buy me another more unpleasant month or less. It might not even work. I don't want that. I can die...I don't have any reason to live anyway."

"Well Karkat, we don't know if it's operable yet...but if it is we'll be sure to get you the news as soon as we can. I know you use the internet, just spend some time looking at articles about chemotherapy. You might change your mind and go for it."

"I won't." His Dad had always said that Karkat's stubbornness would be the death of him, maybe he was right.

"You are free to go, Karkat. I'll have a receptionist call you and redirect you to a specialist on this kind of thing, although I have a feeling that they'll suggest chemotherapy just as I did. Again, I offer my sympathies and I want to say that I honestly hope you can pull through this."

Karkat stood up stock straight with his left leg awkwardly bent off to the side. It had done that ever since he got the bullet taken out of it. Well, now the leg was just as straight as Karkat was, so that might have been a good thing. He just wanted this all to be over with. He shook his doctor's hand, then hightailed it out of that office like a man on a mission.

He got through all the pleasantries with the receptionists at the front desk fairly quickly, and was out in his old car faster than you could shake a stick at.

_'Am I really going to die? Will anyone even care? Does anyone care now? Why should I care if nobody else does?'_

He slammed his head down on the steering wheel, and recoiled in pain when a stabbing sensation filled his entire head. It was akin to being stabbed in the head with knitting needles, and it was a sensation that Karkat had a feeling he was going to have to get used to.

_'Nobody cares, not even you. Nobody ever will care, and nobody ever has in the past.'_

Okay, that sounded quite different from the usual voice in Karkat's head. It was more gravelly and angry sounding, like someone who was eternally pissed off. This voice in particular seemed to fluctuate between sounding quiet and screaming. It certainly wasn't a pleasant thing to hear, that was for damn sure.

It was a long drive home from here, and Karkat wasn't looking forward to spending it in silence. He had long since forgotten what radio station he had set the car's radio to, but whatever it was was going to have to suffice as background music.

_"Now we don't care if you're a girl or a toy, if you're a game or a boy, if you're a nerd or a whore. This shit is so bad it could win a Grammy, this dick is so sick we could start a family. Now this calls for a celebration with a little in-vitro fertilization."_

That gave Karkat an idea. It wasn't a great idea, but it was something he wanted to do now. He only had three months at most...what was the worst that could happen?

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Yeah, I might continue on with this, I might not. I don't know, it all depends on whether or not inspiration strikes me.


End file.
